FIB Aggregation
The rapid growth of Forwarding Information Base (FIB) has raised concerns among many Internet Service Providers. One potential solution to this problem is FIB aggregation, i.e. aggregating FIB entries without affecting the forwarding paths taken by data traffic. It is a purely local software optimization limited within a router, requiring no changes to routing protocols or router hardware. To understand the feasibility of using FIB aggregation to extend router lifetime, we present several FIB aggregation algorithms and evaluate their performance using routing tables and updates from tens of networks. We find that FIB aggregation can reduce the FIB table size by as much as 70% with small computational overhead. We also show that the computational overhead can be controlled through various mechanisms.